"The over-arching theme is change," says Gary Davis, MD, the association's secretary and a member of the meeting's program committee. "The whole structure of the meeting has been changed."

For instance, the first day of the 5-day meeting (Nov. 13) is entirely given over to what the association calls Special Interest Group sessions that take an in-depth look at what's happening in various specialties.

Also, the post-graduate courses have been shortened to a single day, from a day and a half, to make room for 3 full days of basic science sessions, Davis told MedPage Today.

And the meeting sessions have been arranged in tracks to allow participants to learn more about topics in which they have a special interest, he said.

"For instance, if you're interested in fatty liver disease, you won't find so much overlapping" in sessions on the topic, Davis said.

The changes come from suggestions by members, Davis noted, but they are also rather sweeping and might take some people by surprise. "We'll see how people accept change," he said.

On the other hand, what hasn't changed is the continued focus on hepatitis C (HCV) and fatty liver disease, he said.

But HCV is back in the limelight this year, with phase III trial reports on several new drugs and drug combinations, Davis said. "We thought, based on last year, that we were seeing a plateau in hepatitis C," he said, "but the field has just blossomed."

In fact, trial organizers faced an unusual problem when they saw the abstract submissions -- too many phase III trials. "We usually try to present those as oral presentations," Davis said, but because of the numbers, some studies that would ordinarily have been in platform sessions had to be slated for posters.

The studies will report on new drugs, broader "pan-genotypic" uses, and applications to patients with advanced liver dysfunction, Davis said.

One late-breaker study, for instance, gives details of an Egyptian study in patients with genotype 4, a form of HCV that is rare but is relatively common in Egypt. Another reports on outcomes in patients with five of the six HCV genotypes.

Davis said participants can also expect to find an increasing number of studies on hepatitis B and fatty liver disease, as well as reports on an investigational drug for portal hypertension, where current therapies have important limitations.

And issues of health policy and health economics will also be aired, he said. For example, one late-breaker study examines difficulties in getting approval to treat some patients with HCV.

"It's kind of unusual that we have an infectious disease that's curable and yet we're not treating everybody," he said. "I can't think of a single other precedent for that."

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